R awlzickian Global Politics

ONE of the most interesting yet under-explored features of the liberal debate on global justice is the presence of what can be termed Rawlzickians. Rawlzickians are statists who reject libertarianism domestically for Rawlsian reasons, yet employ libertarian terms and arguments globally. My main purpose here is to show that the significance of this libertarian language has been vastly underestimated, even by those who speak it. A few examples should suffice to indicate that "Rawlzickian" is a meaningful category. Michael Blake, explicitly assuming a broadly Rawlsian domestic framework, makes as part of his rejection of global egalitarianism the Hayekian claim that international trade "is a matter here of offers, not of threats."1 Thomas Nagel, who at the domestic level forcefully criticizes the libertarian notion of pre-political ownership,2 contends that "[i]nternational treaties or conventions, such as those that set up the rules of trade … are 'pure' contracts, and nothing guarantees the justice of their results," meaning that "they are like the contracts favored by libertarians."3 Leif Wenar, who has spent considerable energy attacking libertarian unilateral appropriation of the world by individuals,4 employs a parallel to the most famous Nozickian mantra, asserting that "peoples have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)."5 However, for all its recurrence, these and other Rawlzickians currently use libertarian imagery merely as an illustrative device, an instrument for evoking certain moral sensitivities that further elucidate but do not ground the core claims. The same marginal role is apparent in discussions of the most important Rawlzickian—Rawls himself. The extensive literature debating Rawls' international theory gives little independent significance to its libertarian moments. Readers who are sympathetic to Rawls' statist approach tend to marginalize these moments for obvious reasons, while cosmopolitan critics see them as only one example out of many supporting the charge that Rawls' global theory defends a "vanished Westphalian world"6 that is "incoherent"7 with his domestic theory. The view I will elaborate here takes a very different approach to "Rawlzickian" notions. Delving into these notions here, I seek to make two main contributions. First, I aim to establish that Rawlzickian elements crucially underlie, rather than undermine, the internal coherence of Rawlsian statism. I will contend that a Rawlsian rejection of libertarianism at the domestic level not only can, but in fact must, translate—given basic statist premises—into a libertarian position at the global level. I wish to show that the combination of their domestic claims and global premises commits Rawlsian statists to view international affairs in libertarian fashion, that is, as a web of bilateral interactions between "self-owning" agents, with sovereign peoples as the (unitary) agents rather than individuals.8 The libertarian angle will therefore reveal that Rawlsian statists are necessarily committed to national self-ownership, which does not leave room for global egalitarianism. This Rawlzickian commitment, as I will refer to it, constitutes in the first instance a new intervention in an old—or at least familiar—argument about the internal coherence of the Rawlsian statist position. However, second, this intervention also triggers a new argument. For once we fully consider the commitments of the Rawlsian statist position, we find that it necessarily extends beyond its familiar terrain of distributive justice questions, to offer a novel and provocative account of political legitimacy. To anticipate: a key reason why Rawlsian statists must see each sovereign people as a "self-owner" is that, in light of their rejection of natural property, they must also see each sovereign people as the original owner of all the resources encompassed within its territory. This, I will suggest, means that Rawlsian statists must also endorse democratic procedures through which the people as owners can control their property, as standards of legitimacy. In other words, by pushing Rawlsian statists to take the notion of a "property-owning democracy"9 quite literally, the Rawlzickian commitment provides the foundations for a novel property theory of democratic legitimacy. Before I begin to develop these two contributions, I must emphasize that the argument I will offer here is intended as an internal reconstruction of the Rawlsian statist framework, not as a defense of its basic premises. It is of course important to ask whether we should accept these premises—whether the Rawlsian statist position is compelling when examined from the outside. Yet I focus here on a prior question, namely, what is the actual content of this position once its own commitments are fully in view. I will try to show that a libertarian angle can help us see these commitments in a new light—not only as more internally coherent than has often been thought, but also as broader and more distinctive in their combined implications. Yet my effort is independent of whether the Rawlsian statist view as a whole is ultimately persuasive, either normatively or empirically, when examined from an external perspective. With this point in the background, we can turn to the argument's roadmap. After defining Rawlsian statists (Section I) I elaborate on the conditions under which Rawlsians are committed to see agents as self-owners (Section II). I then discuss how Rawlsian statists must hold that these conditions apply to peoples rather than to individuals, meaning that they must see peoples as self-owners, and therefore reject a global replication of the egalitarianism they endorse at the domestic level (Section III). Moving to the article's second contribution, I turn to show how the view of peoples as self-owners grounds a new argument for democratic procedures—free and fair elections and rule of law—as a standard of legitimacy (Section IV). Finally, I anticipate the objection that the positive duty to help "burdened" societies, a duty which all Rawlsian statists endorse, undermines the internal coherence of the Rawlzickian account (Section V). I should start by clarifying what I take the label "Rawlsian statist" to cover. First, I use the term "Rawlsian" here to cover any theorist who has strong deontological foundations and who rejects the libertarian notion of pre-political property rights. "Rawlsian" thus defined is, importantly, a very broad church, encompassing a crowd far larger than only those who adhere to the specifics of Rawls' domestic theory. The church remains quite broad when we turn to define "statists." Statists take existing sovereign "peoples," conceived of as unitary actors, as the primary unit of normative global analysis. This focus on peoples is combined with skepticism concerning the core ideas of political cosmopolitanism. In particular, this skepticism is evident in three basic premises. First, statists assume the absence of world government. Second, statists reject or at least marginalize the cosmopolitan idea that all Earth's resources are originally the common property of humankind. Third, statists believe that assuming non-interference in its affairs, each people's choices exercise a decisive impact on its fortunes, which normally overcomes any factors outside of its control. Almost any cosmopolitan will be critical of at least one of these premises, and some cosmopolitans might reject all of them.10 Yet arguably very few cosmopolitans would think that these premises alone, even if admitted for the sake of discussion, suffice for Rawlsian statists to be able to achieve their familiar conclusion: that egalitarian principles such as the difference principle apply only domestically, among co-citizens, but not globally among peoples. The first stage of this article, however, argues that these three premises not only suffice—not only make it possible for Rawlsians who accept them to reject global egalitarianism—but in fact make it necessary for domestic Rawlsians to be global libertarians, who think about peoples as self-owners. In order to explain why Rawlsian statists must be committed to thinking about peoples as self-owners, I first need to elaborate on what it means to say that an agent is "self-owning." For libertarians, such a statement embodies certain claims regarding the nature of the agent's rights, the agent's property, and the agent's responsibilities. These themes are obviously interrelated, yet for the sake of clarity I present each in turn. Attributing "self-ownership" to agents means attributing to them rights of a strongly deontological nature. The rights of self-owning agents are deontological first in that these rights are considered foundational: the agent is taken to enjoy certain inviolable rights by its very existence as an autonomous agent. Second, concurrently, respect for the agent's rights is understood as a matter of inherent right and wrong. Specifically, the deontological "priority of the right to the good"11 means that the rights of self-owning agents must (at least under normal circumstances) be respected independently of and prior to utility considerations—either utility in general or even the agent's own utility. Indeed, third, the rights of self-owners have a profoundly anti-paternalist element: these rights give their bearers robust immunities from interference by other agents, such that interference remains illegitimate even when done for the good of the agents themselves. Fourth, the rights of self-owners act primarily as constraints upon the actions of other agents.12 These rights only specify what each agent ought not to do to other agents, without defining an overall outcome that is to be attained independently of these constraints. There is no overall state of affairs to be brought about, no right end-state that is distinct from the simple aggregation of specific agents who each avoid actions that are morally wrong. The duties of self-owners, then, are agent-oriented rather than outcome-oriented. Fifth, this understanding of rights means that the main duties in a world of self-owners are negative ones. Morally driven agents should focus on observing the constraints imposed by the rights of other agents, prior to and independently of any positive duty to promote better outcomes for others. In a libertarian realm populated by self-owning agents, there is no need for overarching institutions to know the content of agents' rights, or of their correlative negative duties. The main reason is that self-owning agents enjoy determinate property rights that are prior to any overarching institutions. Property rights are by far the most crucial rights for libertarians, who tend to believe that practically all significant rights can be understood, at bottom, as incidents of ownership. Libertarians hold that agents have robust property rights which not only include all the immunities described above, but also precede institutional frameworks within which agents operate. Specifically, self-owning agents are the starting point of any property system—they are the original owners of property in the world. Legitimate exchanges of property between self-owners require, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, not institutions of any kind but only actual and explicit consent from all agents involved.13 The primary duty of each self-owning agent is to respect the property of other such agents and to obtain their explicit consent for any use of it. No agent needs overarching institutions in order to know what this duty entails. If institutions ought to exist at all "above" agents (an open question for libertarians), then their sole function is simply to ensure that the immunities generated by property rights are indeed respected. Libertarians marginalize overarching structures in favor of an exclusive focus on agents also on the basis of empirical beliefs concerning agents' responsibility. Central to the libertarian ethos is the empirical claim that at least when property rights are respected, agents' choices exercise an overwhelming impact on their prospects, which in normal circumstances suffices to overcome any impact of unchosen factors—whether the agent's own (unchosen) natural endowments, or the structure of the external environment within which agents operate.14 In a libertarian world, agency vastly dominates structure. This picture of causal responsibility is closely tied to libertarian claims concerning moral responsibility. The belief that agents' circumstances are so strongly caused by their own (voluntary) actions rather than any factors outside of their control fuels the libertarian claim that when agents achieve economic success they have no general duty to share the fruits of their success with others. This empirical belief also fuels the corresponding normative claim: that when agents fail they rarely have anyone to blame but themselves (assuming their property rights are respected), and therefore cannot, at least in anything but the most extreme circumstances, rightly demand support from others. These themes of the nature of rights, property, and responsibility combine to generate the following libertarian conclusion: all political issues can and ought to be broken down to the behavior of specific agents. From a libertarian point of view there is no "problem of political justice" that is distinct from the sum of particular agents' conduct.15 Politics is reduced to aggregate ethics: in order to solve political problems we must disaggregate them into distinct bilateral ties between specific "self-owners" who first and foremost respect the negative duties imposed by the property rights of other agents, seeking explicit consent from others for any use of their property. Where do Rawlsians stand in relation to these libertarian claims? It might be tempting to answer "in complete opposition." But things are in fact more complex. Rawlsians wholeheartedly agree with libertarians concerning what is arguably the most pivotal theme of the three just mentioned—the nature of rights. Rawlsians endorse all of the deontological features of agents' rights that libertarians emphasize. In particular, they agree that in all but the most exceptional circumstances, agents' rights confer upon them "an inviolability founded on justice" that the welfare of others "cannot override."16 Rawlsians further accept that an agent's rights generate extremely stringent and weighty constraints upon the actions of others, prohibiting even certain actions meant to further the agent's own good.17 Finally, Rawlsians, in line with common sense moral thought, generally agree with the claim that agents' negative duties not to violate these constraints are primary and, all else equal, stronger than positive duties to help others,18 particularly given the "strains of commitment" imposed by the latter.19 We are in full agreement that: if (1) the full content of agents' core rights, including property rights, is determined prior to overarching institutions, and if (2) assuming non-interference by others, unchosen circumstances normally have only very limited impact on how agents are faring; then your normative picture obtains. Under these two conditions, liberal political theory really can be reduced to aggregate ethics, demanding from each agent primarily to respect the constraints imposed by the rights of other agents.20 With the foundations of our discussion now in place, I wish to turn to the first substantive contribution of my argument. I aim to establish that while Rawlsians believe that neither the responsibility nor the rights condition obtain at the domestic level, where persons are the agents in question, they also believe that both conditions obtain at the global level, where the primary agents are peoples. Therefore, Rawlsian statists must see global politics as aggregate ethics—a web of bilateral ties between "self-owning" peoples. In this picture of global politics, there is no room for replicating the egalitarian arrangements that Rawlsians advocate at the domestic level. Let us begin with the responsibility condition. At the domestic level, where the agents in question are individual persons, the responsibility condition is missing. Rawlsians do not deny that individuals share responsibility for their own circumstances through the choices they make. But Rawlsians also emphasize, far more than libertarians, the causal impact of social, economic and political structures within which individuals operate. Rawlsians hold that society's "basic structure" exercises a significant impact upon individuals' fortunes. The major institutions that comprise a society's basic structure, such as its property and legal system, "influence," as Rawls writes, individuals' "life prospects, what they can expect to be and how well they can hope to do. The basic structure is the primary subject of justice, because its effects are so profound and present from the start."21 Rawlsians additionally tend (though less unanimously) to emphasize the impact of unchosen natural endowments on individuals' prospects as a factor that should be taken into account, and when possible mitigated, when designing a society's basic structure in general and property system in particular. In contrast to this domestic picture, in the global context, where peoples rather than individual persons are the agents in question, Rawlsian statists hold that the responsibility condition obtains. The belief is that unchosen circumstances normally have only a very limited impact on peoples' fortunes. This belief is evident, first, in Rawlsian statists' distinct marginalization of the idea that there is a global basic structure that cannot be reduced to specific interactions between specific peoples. This marginalization explains why the idea of a self-sufficient agent—to which only libertarians appeal domestically—suddenly becomes relevant for Rawlsian statists at the global level. Thus for instance, Blake's Rawlsian account of global distributive justice hinges on a tale of two autarkic societies that come to trade with one another. The autarky assumption fuels Blake's aforementioned claim that even if these societies eventually come to engage in extensive trade, no egalitarian duties would arise between them because "international trade is a matter of offers, not of threats." the causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political culture and in the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that support the basic structure of their political and social institutions, as well as in the industriousness and cooperative talents of its members, all supported by their political virtues … there is no society anywhere in the world—except for marginal cases—with resources so scarce that it could not, were it reasonably and rationally organized and governed, become well-ordered … resource-poor countries may do very well (e.g., Japan), while resource-rich countries may have serious difficulties (e.g., Argentina). The crucial elements that make the difference are the political culture, the political virtues and civic society of the country, its members' probity and industriousness, their capacity for innovation, and much else. Crucial also is the country's population policy: it must take care that it does not overburden.22 While the responsibility condition covers largely familiar territory, the rights condition is more novel and requires more intricate analysis. One reason, as I hope to demonstrate, is that the rights condition involves a complex—and hitherto unnoticed—interaction between Rawlsian statists' domestic commitments and global premises. At the domestic level, when the agents in question are individuals, Rawlsians clearly think that the rights condition is absent. Rawlsians believe that the full content of individual rights and correlative duties remains underdetermined without sovereign institutions. importantly, the full content of individual property rights is underdetermined prior to sovereign institutions, to there is no such as pre-political property rights. The idea that persons have robust property rights in anything external to their prior to political society is a For Rawlsians, as for many more the and libertarian notion that persons can property in the external world by their with is and in some profoundly Finally, even if individual pre-political property rights could be these rights one to a to of property through the of all the to an For all of these reasons, Rawlsians reject pre-political property rights. Rawlsians believe that discussions of property rights should begin from the assumption that sovereign a property through political institutions, and should do so by and rather than The rejection of natural property is what the two defining of the Rawlsian deontological of rights and It is because Rawlsians reject natural property rights that they can also that their egalitarianism does not violate the property rights of some agents for the sake of it is with Rawls' deontological commitment to all persons as in there are no property rights there are no or of property rights that precede political and that such than property rights other rights in fashion, political one when what property rights should exist from the to property as a social and principles of justice as to how this and other basic institutions ought to specify and rights and and and and Therefore, the Rawlsian position, to use Thomas words, is that Nozickian property rights should … be but rather that there are on a level of property rights in the first This is crucial here it makes it possible to see the in which Rawlsians endorse the libertarian understanding of property rights. Rawlsians agree with the libertarian that property rights generate extremely robust immunities for their The Rawlsian claim is simply that we cannot know what property rights obtain prior to and independently of political But once the political has been once the has defined property rights, individual property enjoy in their interactions immunities that are just as strong as those that libertarians political institutions the necessary we do know who is no concerning the immunities that individuals enjoy one another. In this context, the libertarian of agents' property rights as stringent and weighty upon the actions of other agents is a that, for all its Rawls and does This point has been in the of libertarian that Rawlsian egalitarianism has for into the as a defense of or as to libertarian from its own deontological starting But from a Rawlsian such on a for the libertarian claim that Rawlsians on individual property through that individuals have a right to their But Rawlsians believe such a right simply does not the individuals have a right to in a property system in as Rawls and are all in principle At the same within this and condition from the and are to condition from the the of develop with to their these ground property rights all other individuals that all the immunities that libertarians emphasize. is why Rawlsians share with libertarians the upon the of with their individual rights, including property rights. libertarian there is no of in Rawlsian egalitarianism. Rawlsians are just as committed as libertarians are to rights if the domestic difference on this between Rawlsians and libertarians indeed only from the Rawlsian that individual property rights do not exist prior to overarching institutions, then an important In where Rawlsians believe that agents do enjoy determinate property rights prior to overarching the is if the responsibility condition is as Rawlsians must endorse libertarian This, I now turn to is what has to for Rawlsian statists at the global level. The combination of their domestic commitments and their global premises determinate property rights for property precede overarching global institutions. In order to see why that is the we need to consider the Rawlsian rejection of natural property rights and its relation to we have just Rawlsians not the robust nature of property rights by but rather the idea that individuals are the original original agents from which a property system But if individuals are not the original who At first it might that three other The original owner can be (1) sovereign (2) a distinct group within a sovereign or as a a global owner However, Rawlsian statists have in only one they must be committed to see peoples as the first original in sovereign societies is for Rawlsians, because hold that the state ought to the to claims to distinct property by particular social within the The should such property claims if and only if these claims are with some of the of respect all the as Yet Rawlsian statists also cannot consider as a whole the original After Rawlsian by marginalize the cosmopolitan notion that as a whole originally all of the and explicitly assume or reject the world that would arguably be to such cosmopolitan ownership. From a Rawlsian statist then, only sovereign peoples can be the original are therefore "self-owners" in this crucial sense as The here from is significant yet and so it might be to consider the same point from different In the rights the assumption has been that the to property within its is from a right of The main reason given in support of this assumption is the claim that a people's both and property. It is considered as for example that there is a the people's to of property and their to the whole of the state as well as But from a Rawlsian there is no original we natural property, and believe that individuals come to own only what the them to we must see all as originally If there is no such as pre-political individual property, then the not only the of property rights within its but is also the actual first owner of all resources encompassed within this A might that this argument from to ownership. After of for is not to of it is to such But what this objection is that property is If the is to claim a to individual property rights in specific it must also claim some prior This point is most obvious in the of such as natural for to a the original to individual